Ultrabook: Intel’s $300 million plan to beat Apple at its own game

In an effort to blunt the (ARM-based) tablet threat, Intel wants PC makers to …

My desktop isn't the only computer I plan to replace in the next few months. I need a new laptop too, and my goal is simple: to find a 13" MacBook Air that isn't made by Apple.

It turns out that I'm not the only one wanting this mythical non-Apple MacBook Air. Intel wants them too—it calls them Ultrabooks. The chip company has been kicking the Ultrabook idea around for a few months now, and it has grand ambitions: by the end of next year, it wants 40 percent of PC laptops to be Ultrabooks.

Ultrabooks are ultralight PCs, like the MacBook Air, no more than 0.8" thick, like the MacBook Air, with Intel processors, like the MacBook Air, metal cases for superior heat dissipation, like the MacBook Air, SSD storage, like the MacBook Air, long battery life and even longer standby time, like the MacBook Air, and affordable, like the MacBook Air. Oh, and they should boot in 7 seconds or less (which at a pinch, the MacBook Air can probably pull off, too). Is the MacBook Air actually an Ultrabook? Intel told us that that's up to Apple—the MacBook Air is an Ultrabook in all but name.

Intel, keen to stimulate demand for PCs (rather than for ARM-powered tablets) is clearly so annoyed by the inability for PC OEMs to meet this specification that it recently announced the creation of a $300m "Ultrabook Fund" to invest in companies that are working to build this kind of hardware. That's a damning indictment of the PC industry.

What Intel is asking for is readily attainable. We know that because Apple's selling millions of Airs. And yet the world's five biggest PC manufacturers—HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and Asustek—have so far been unable to come up with something equivalent. And apparently they're not close to managing it, either, because Intel thinks it must invest pots of cash to close the gap.

This isn't an ideal approach; it would be better if the OEMs could produce these machines on their own. Still, the impetus is now there. Problem solved? Probably not.

My quest

I'm not being difficult just for the sake of it.

The latest MacBook Air is a desirable machine in many ways. The size, weight, screen resolution, and battery life are all fantastic, and the pricing is incredible. Seriously, did Apple forget to put a 1 before the 999? Unfortunately, Apple's hardware drives me up the wall in a number of ways that might seem insignificant to you, but which together simply wear me down. I've tried living with an Apple laptop day in, day out, and I just can't.

First of all, we have the keyboard. Sure, Apple keyboards have a decent feel, and that backlight, which a lot of people seem to go crazy for, is kind of fancy. It's just too bad that Cupertino can't get the damn keyboard layout right.

I'm English—a walking, talking Brit. I put "u"s in words like "favourite" and "colour," I see plays at the "theatre," and I walk on the "pavement." This has repercussions. The first is that I've been typing on a British keyboard layout for 20 years, and you know what? I'm damned if I'm going to stop now.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn't sell a keyboard with a standard UK layout (BS 4822, for standards wonks out there). Apple has a keyboard layout it calls "UK"; I even get a £ symbol from pressing shift-3, just like on a real UK keyboard. But I expect to find #, the symbol that on American keyboards occupies the same shift-3 spot, on a dedicated key of its own, found on most keyboards around the world but not in the US. Several other keys have also been moved around. And it's for no good reason, as far as I can discern.

This is what a UK keyboard is meant to look like.

I can fix this flaw in software. I have a custom keyboard layout that makes the right characters appear when I press the keys, so it's not fatal. It's just ugly; the keycaps no longer match the letters that appear on-screen.

What I can't fix in software is Apple's idiotic narrow return key. On non-US keyboards, the return key is double-height, wider at the top than the bottom. The top part is not quite as wide as backspace above it, but even the bottom half is wider than a normal keycap. Not so on Apple's keyboards. The top part is just under the width of a standard key. The bottom part is, optimistically, half the width of a standard key. The result? I miss the return key all the time. Even after six months straight on a MacBook Pro, I miss. Other laptop keyboards don't do this. IBM didn't. Lenovo doesn't. Dell doesn't. HP doesn't. It's just Cupertino being difficult.

I also use the page navigation keys—the home/end, page up/page down block of six—about a million times a day. Well, except when I'm using a Mac, because (ha-ha) Apple doesn't include them. This isn't a new thing, mind you; the company has just never cared for them. The keys can be found on the full-size "extended" keyboards, but not on any portable. There are workarounds—key combinations that I can never remember—but I want real hardware keys. Unfixable.

I'm also a total sucker for TrackPoints ("nipples"). Apple's trackpads are the best in the business, and gestures are great. But I just don't care. I'm faster and more precise with a TrackPoint. Even better, give me both. A TrackPoint for pointing; a touchpad for gesturing.

On top of all that, I want to use Windows on my laptop. I'll also want to use the Windows 8 beta on it. That means I can't afford to be held hostage by Apple's lazy Bootcamp driver support. Even if all the other flaws are resolved, this one's a dealbreaker.

These might seem like minor issues. Perhaps they are; other people may not give a tinker's cuss about any of them. But a computer is essential to my job and my life. I put thousands of words into the keyboard every day and easily rack up 80 hours a week of computer use. New PCs cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, and I shouldn't have to settle for something that doesn't actually fit my needs.

So that leaves me wanting a 13" MacBook Air that isn't made by Apple. Time to go shopping.

Good article Peter, it echoes a number of conversations I've had over the past few months with HP and Lenovo. They simply don't have an answer to Apple, no wonder HP corp wants out. It's a shame as the PSG business has some great things going for it, their workstations are top notch for example.

It was nice to see this article posted, as I'm currently going through the same thing.

After seeing my GF buy a 13" Air (2011), I've given up on waiting for one of these PC companies to get it together. I installed Windows 7 in Bootcamp and the experience was painless. It's also damning, when the best engineered product in it's category is also the cheapest. I'm buying my laptop in a couple of weeks and unless I see an 11" ultrabook pop up out of nowhere that's price and feature-competitive with Apple, I'm going to the dark side.

Here's some flamebait that I have to get off my chest: Why are we talking about Apple AT ALL anyway? It's freakin 10% of the market people. Apple puts fashion and design over performance in most of what they sell, and when they don't you pay a king's ransom for it. You can't get what's right for YOU, but only what's right for Apple. Who care's if they're light? The design choices they made to get it there aren't worth it IMO.

Generally speaking, unless they're doing media production I can't take someone using a MAC as a "professional" seriously. If we're talking about TOYS, then fine. Macs win. Now are they doing some things that are "Cool" and could be nice to see in PC based products? Of course. But these arguments saying "But, But that's not a MacBook Air!" are just RIDICULOUS IMO.

I think Apple are a bunch of bastards, yes, the whole lot of them, all lumped together - from Steve to the lady who works in the cafeteria.

If you have read many of my past posts you can see the above is true...and the only reason I mention this is because you don't confuse me as an iToy fanboi when I say:

The Air is a sexy little thing and worth the money IMHO.In all the years of Apple products this is the first one that I am really tempted to plonk down money for (had a MBP which I sold ASAP,sister has plenty of icrap so I have seen their stuff around me many a time) - but this is so good I am _almost_ willing to give Apple my money and put up with all their crap.

IF on the other hand someone in the PC market does come up with a decent knockoff bent towards windows 7 - it would be great not to feel like a sold out whore and not "compromise" by getting an Air.

Unfortunately I have yet to see a decent alternative that matches or beats the Air.

If Intel was serious about beating Apple, it would stop selling its chips to Apple.

I think that Intel has seen what Apple has done with the hardware format and isn't necessarily looking to "drive" Apple out of business but sell more parts in this factor to more players. It doesn't really look like in this article that they're intending to become something they're not now, that is a PC vendor, competing with everyone that they now supply to.

If Intel was serious about beating Apple, it would stop selling its chips to Apple.

I think that Intel has seen what Apple has done with the hardware format and isn't necessarily looking to "drive" Apple out of business but sell more parts in this factor to more players. It doesn't really look like in this article that they're intending to become something they're not now, that is a PC vendor, competing with everyone that they now supply to.

Driving Apple out of the market isn't the goal. Driving others in, is. Having one client be the only customer for a product line is way too volatile.

I have two comments.... 1) Dell, etc., are going to have problems with making a machine that costs $700 to build, and sell it profitably for under $999, when they are flushing $50-100 right down the toilet to Microsoft for every machine. They should be running Ubuntu or something like this on them. That would also mean they don't need these processors clocked higher than the Macbook Air's just to overcome Windows' bloatedness and keep adequate performance. Apple of course spends money on OSX development.

2) I do not see Apple as Intel's target, but rather ARM -- although Dell or the like making that thin of a machine would probably increase sales among those who won't be caught dead with an Apple product (like me), ARM is the big threat to Intel. Running Ubuntu, the only stuff I run that is non-portable is Skype and Flash. Ubuntu has a full port to ARM, and Flash is ported to ARM -- I could replace my x86 systems with ARMs today, not loose a drop of functionality, and have power-efficient desktops and a notebook that has far better battery life and far less heat generation. If there is no ARM port of Skype, it's just not that CPU-intensive so it should run fine under qemu (besides the full virtual machine mode, qemu has a second mode that runs a non-native Linux binary directly on your system, so something like "qemu-i386 skype" and skype would pop up right on the desktop...)

Good article, I was very interested in getting some insight into why this category machine has been so hard for PC makers to match thus far. Don't listen to the haters Peter.

This. There's a lot of "common knowledge" about Apple inferiority layered through this community which just isn't true. Nothing to do about it, but details about how Apple is building beautiful machines at price points PC manufacturers can't match will help.

I sympathize with your keyboard issues. Mine are different, but I don't like Apple keyboards (and don't type on even PC laptops except in meetings); I use MacAlly external full-size keyboards on all my Macs.

I also sympathize with your experience on the web sites. Our company decided to supply 13" Dells to everyone as their laptop replacements this past year. A group of us in Ops who need enough real estate to pop open 30 DOS windows with a batch file, or to operate our machine while RDP'd into two others, objected, and I had to navigate the Dell site to try to construct a 17" alternative. Just awful (and having a difficult time finding previous pages on subsequent visits). I ended up with a $2300 option, which the company wasn't going for. The one the company chose was pretty nice by PC standards - SSD, Sandy Bridge - but 768 pixel display height? Get real. And although it wasn't *that* much bigger, when you set it next to a MBA, it looked twice the size. And listed for $1550.

You had an OK start with the keyboard, but I stopped reading when you started slamming Apple for not providing something on their laptops that has absolutely no interest to them or their target market. You want to run Windows - betas nonetheless - and don't want to wait for Apple's "lazy" driver support - for someone else's OS - in beta. You're kidding right? And the (horrid IMHO) trackpoint - why the hell would Apple want to do that?

Like every machine made by any manufacturer, the Air isn't for everyone. If it doesn't fit your requirements don't buy it - wait for someone else to make one that does - but don't try to rubbish what's out there for "missing features" that aren't even relevant to it's target market. You had a point with the keyboard, the rest is bunkum...

The point is, if you want to run Windows, though MacBook Airs work, they are not optimal. But when you look at PC laptops... they're not very good. And it's not just me who's noticed this gap: Intel has too.

Apple machines may have the capability to run Windows. But no one in their right mind would buy a MacBook to run windows as the Primary operating system.

The author has also missed the point here. It's not a Macbook if it's not running Mac OS X. Apple's software is as much a part of the package as the hardware.

I know I'm several years late to the party on this one, but thank you for a good description of the frustrations of laptop shopping when price is important but not the Number 1 consideration. I had to replace a laptop about a month ago, and most of what you say here still holds true.